Pedro Cano, Fedora, da Le città invisibili, acquerello su carta, Blanca, Fundación Pedro Cano.

I went to the exhibition for a very specific reason: I hoped to see somehow materialized the world of cosmicomic tales, to which an entire room is indeed dedicated. The pleasure of entering it was all the more intense as it was the first room sufficiently distant from the hypnotic repetition of the proposed musical background that one finds from the beginning of the journey into this exhibition until the very end. The setup, in which the first editions of the “astronomical” volumes (Le cosmicomiche, Ti con zero, La memoria del mondo) are exhibited alongside the originals of their respective cover works, is structured by a large diagonal that connects a painting by Richard Serra dedicated to Calvino, possibly depicting a large black hole, and the historic map of the Luna by Gian Domenico Cassini preserved at the Paris Observatory, on which the eye bounces from a more playful lunar illustration taken from a book. In this room, the connections underlying Calvino’s narratives become tangible: fragments of reality integrate into poetic and fairy-tale constructions, as in the microcosms of Joseph Cornell and Mark Dion.

Vittore Carpaccio, San Giorgio che uccide il drago e quattro scene del suo martirio, 1516. Venezia, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Benedicti Claustra Onlus.

Invisible but dynamic connections that have more to do with travel than with the network: between the observation of the real and the imaginary, between the given and the possible, between historical or physical space and the world of fairy tales. Normally, the reader is supposed to travel through these itineraries that Calvino creates and tells us through the act of reading, while in the exhibition, the audience is invited to physically traverse them inside the writer’s “mental workshop.”

Tullio Pericoli, Italo Calvino, 2012. Collezione dell’artista / © Tullio Pericoli.

An exhibition succeeds when its narrative transcends the limitations of mere written words, invoking a unique essence that cannot be easily replicated by a simple essay, as it intimately connects with and draws inspiration from the showcased works. In Favoloso Calvino the physical dimension of the writer’s visual imagination allows, much more than illustrating his writings, to experience his gaze.

What I truly admire about Calvino is his unpretentious naturalness in describing and narrating reflections that arise from diverse occasions, including visits to art exhibitions. One cannot but wonder, what he would have thought about not only this exhibition, but the overall turmoil in Rome as well as in Genoa with the exhibition Calvino Cantafavole at the Palazzo Ducale to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of his birth.

Arianne Palla studied art history at the Sorbonne before specializing in restoration at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, focusing on mosaic techniques. Currently, she works as a restorer between Paris and Florence, maintaining her research interests in the field of visual and applied arts with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches.

L'articolo Astronomical Connections: An Intermedial Journey at Calvino’s Exhibition in Rome sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Performance poetry is an ideal case to prompt reflection on this question. Italian poet and performer Lello Voce brought the poetry slam to Italy in 2001, and in 2004 seven thousand people attended a poetry slam in Perugia: unimaginable numbers for traditional poetry readings. In his 2014 conversation with Lello Voce in Monza, Marc Kelly Smith, American poet and founder of the poetry slam movement in Chicago in 1987, remarks that ‘the competition is a game’, ‘a theatrical device’, ‘a type of show’. It was designed to be ‘a mockery of competition’: he says that five random audience members judge the artwork on a scale of one to ten, and points out that for years the prize in Chicago was simply cupcakes. Yet, if these events reclaim the ritualistic and collective dimension that poetry had for centuries, what do performers and audiences actually share during such events? How do they participate in an experience involving spoken words, body movements and often sound, as well as co-presence?

In May 2021, Italian performance artist Giuliano Logos won the XV World Poetry Slam Championship in Paris. One of the seven pieces he performed at the contest is Date loro fuoco. The title refers to the exhortation repeated throughout the poem and the exhortative mode is enhanced by a change in intonation. The recitation gets progressively louder and more agitated, but the utterance ‘date loro fuoco’ preserves a calm assertiveness throughout. Words, breath, voice and body movements all contribute to the performance of the gesture of exhortation. Gestures can move not only across languages, but also across media. The video recording of the performance in front of an audience and the online performance in front of a camera foreground two different ‘events’ of the poem. In the first video, the people addressed by the plural ‘you’ are those in the room, not those watching the recording. The experience of the poem is collective, even though not all spectators in the room may feel equally included in that collectivity, whose boundaries are drawn by the if-clauses that introduce the exhortation. In the second video, ‘we’ are the viewers addressed by ‘you’.

These two videos exemplify two ways of understanding lyric poetry: 1. poetry as heard, the reader feels that the words of the poem are addressed to them; 2. poetry as overheard, the words are addressed to someone else and the reader is overhearing them. This shift is made possible by the affordances of the digital medium, but has always been structural to the lyric and is based on the fundamental gesture of deixis. The lyric makes the most of the deictic power of language and, more generally, of an open referentiality: its language points to something or someone external to the text. The poem does not create a fictional world and referentiality is not fulfilled within it. Based on the text, we do not know for sure who is included in the ‘you’; this is only defined in the event of the poem. Feeling addressed by the poem’s gesture not only entails participation, but can lead to specific responses. When circulated on social media, YouTube or other dedicated platforms, gestures can be reenacted by members of the expanded audience, who in turn may respond to the poem by producing new poems that perform the same gesture.

Still from the YouTube video Poesia ad Alta Voce – Marc Kelly Smith e Lello Voce (2014)

Still from the YouTube video by Giuliano Logos Date Loro Fuoco (2021)

L'articolo The Lyric Put to the Test: Performance Poetry and Transmedia Gestures sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In contrast to this perspective, Italian poet Laura Pugno, born in Rome in 1970, has embarked on an exploration of the intermedial dialogue between poetry and photography to unveil a different truth. Pugno’s poetics diverge from the notion of photography as an objective witness to reality, a medium incapable of falsehood. Her approach stems from two central questions: how can one deceive using one’s own image? And how can the manipulation, modification, or exaggeration of one’s own image prompt contemplation of the defining mechanisms of poetry?

Pugno’s book, titled Il colore oro (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2007), delves into intermedial practice, forging a connection between the language of poetry and an exploration of otherness, decentralization, and openness. In this work, poetic text relies on visually rich, polished, and compelling poetic imagery. The book itself incorporates photographs, materializing in the form of unraveled marble surfaces, detailed hieratic gestures, and prominent elements in the foreground such as hands holding bowls or dripping with colors. These two layers—the textual and the photographic—engage in a dialectical (and thus also symbolic) exchange, not overlapping or merely chasing each other, but converging to construct an emblematic work. The surfaces and volumes, the interplay of light and darkness, make it an exceptionally traversable piece.

Photography enables the poetic text to adopt a ritualistic tone through the consistent use of the apostrophe. Running through the entire collection is a transversal apostrophe, embodied by the figure of a ‘mermaid-thou’ that, unchallenged, dominates the extensive cast of lyrical referents in Il colore oro. The mermaid represents an estranged and alienated dimension of the offended ‘female’, an object of both violence and adoration, a deconsecrated idol, a chimera embodying the absence of the ‘you’ in the Western lyric tradition:

se le belle

sirene ci divoreranno,

se le belle bestie disumane

non sei tu quella che ascolta queste voci

non sei tu che giochi

con noi,

dea d’oro, ragazza-marmellata

[if the beautiful / mermaids devour us, / if the beautiful inhuman beasts / it is not you who hears these voices / it is not you who plays / with us, / you golden goddess, you marmalade-girl]

The ‘mermaid-thou’ becomes a complex extension of this absent and ever-changing feminine essence, which is perpetually captured in the ritualistic process of transforming into something other than oneself (‘la ragazza . . . diventerà sirena’). Simultaneously, the ‘mermaid-thou’ enables Pugno to initiate a metamorphosis of the lyrical subject. As Pugno expressed in her interview for the Non solo muse project:

Ho sempre definito l’io in posizione mobile, nel senso che è tendenzialmente annidato nel tu: il tu delle mie poesie è molto spesso l’io sotto mentite spoglie o può essere l’io come pronuncia del discorso, ma allo stesso tempo anche l’io come qualcuno che quell’io riceve, quindi una posizione dialogica rifratta in una dinamica di specchi.

[I have always defined the ‘I’ in a mobile position, in the sense that it tends to be nested in the ‘you’: the ‘you’ in my poems is very often the ‘I’ in disguise or can be the ‘I’ as the pronouncement of speech, but at the same time also the ‘I’ as someone who that ‘I’ receives, thus a dialogical position refracted in a dynamic of mirrors.]

What the powerful encounter between poetry and photography accomplishes is precisely the redefinition of boundaries between subject and object, image and text, self and other, masculine and feminine, human and animal, in a new intermedial dialogue redefining both the lyric genre and that of photographic self-portrait.

Picture by Elio Mazzane, published in: Laura Pugno, Il colore oro (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2007, p. 94)

Picture by Elio Mazzane, published in: Laura Pugno, Il colore oro (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2007, p. 108)

Picture by Elio Mazzane, published in: Laura Pugno, Il colore oro (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2007, p. 115)

L'articolo “Se le belle / sirene ci divoreranno”: Photographic Lyricism in Laura Pugno’s “Il colore oro” sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Schooled in the study of classics, inspired by Kantor’s and Grotowski’s physical theatre, Dante’s originality stems mainly from her own Sicilian culture. Indeed she uses images taken from both Christian and orthodox Sicilian iconography as they are expressed in religious rites and in traditional forms of entertainment, in paintings and sculptures, in music and songs, mixing the ancestral with the contemporary to enhance the expressive and the symbolic meaning of her work. In the last decade her imagery has extended considerably to include dance, choreography and body language taken from rituals around the world.

Euripides’s tragedy Heracles which she directed in 2017 for the Teatro di Siracusa, Sicily, epitomises her dramatic language. Written in about 416 BC, the tragedy consists of two main scenes. In the first, Megara, Heracles’s spouse, their children and Amphitryon, the hero’s father, prepare to be sacrificed by Lycus, the usurper of Thebes. In the second, Heracles returns unexpectedly, kills Lycus, but taken by a divinely induced frenzy murders his own wife and children.

The themes of sorrow and pain in the first scene and the one of revenge and tragedy in the second, considered by some critics to be loosely connected, are in Dante’s treatment  unified as cause and effect. Having chosen a flowing narrative format, she reinforces it with a sweeping circular action whose relentless rhythm is more cinematic than theatrical. As in a film montage, an unbroken activity of visual and auditory images of actors, drummers, dancers and chorus replaces the separation in acts. The grandeur of film scenography together with religious iconography have inspired her depiction of the constant theme of death in the monumental set. It fills the stage as stunning as the colossal scenes built by the Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures in its heyday: a four-tiered white mausoleum of burial boxes with the framed images of the dead preceded by cubiform tombs filled with water. The language of religious iconography recurs in expressive and symbolic images: Megara dressed as a processional Madonna, an incense burner appears as a prop, stylised spinning crosses are dotted on the stage, ablution and water are constitutive images for the preparation of the human sacrifice, red mourning lamps surround the tombs of the victims and the choir’s reversed flowery gowns mirror earthen burial mounds.

Languages from other media are called upon to build a network of visual and  metaphorical images. Oriental dance inspires the three rotating dervishes and the allegorical spinning Death. The renowned Sicilian Teatro dei Pupi (puppet theatre) with its sixteenth century stories of Crusade heroes is the source for costumes, gestures and movements of Heracles and his friend Theseus. They do not walk, they run and jump, they physically clash cuirasses and limbs, they genuflect and leap, they throw violently down their long black hair to cover their faces when in distress and fling it back when determined or hopeful, just as the puppets are made to do with the flowing mane decorating their helmets. Music increases the activity of the play dialogues with religious chants and horrific mourning cries, and, at the other end of the spectrum, with pop and digital music. The distorted movements and the mask-like grotesque facial expressions of servants and choir are paralleled by the costumes. Painting lends an expressionistic palette to their colours: long black gowns combined with white bibs as beards for the choir and with strident fucsia for the hooded tops of Lycus’s malign helpers. Pre-Raphaelite paintings inspire Megara’s clothes.

In short, Dante’s process of transformation and migration of forms and content between media enhances the productivity and the plurality of signification of her work, in which ethnographic and anthropological dialogues cross with symbolic discourse and visionary creativity.

L'articolo Emma Dante’s ‘Heracles’: The Relational Activity of Media in the Theatre sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In our practices, Ellen and I are both interested in the technical and conceptual crossings between design, art and craft in relation to data visualization (in this case text and textiles), often working through social design issues, sexuality and gender-challenging themes.

</unravel;> is a performance of the making of a 25-meter knitted manifesto which unravels ideas and preconceptions of binarisms: craft and design, analog and digital, female and male, zeroes and ones. Through the hacking of binary systems, we challenged the notion of gender binary tout court.

The performative design piece was presented during Degree Show 2: Design, at Central Saint Martins, London. For this final collaboration, we found there was no better way to talk about binarisms than by using the binary system par excellence: weaving and the Jacquard loom is the first form of programming. The process took two months of researching, experimenting and prototyping. During this time, we learned how to set up a knitting machine, we hacked the Brother 950i, worked out on how to knit type and wrote an essay on gender binaries.

Perfectly summed up in the word textus, text and textiles are deeply linked and interconnected with coding. Language and knitting are coded systems themselves: a set of rules and functions. In this process of interlacing yarns and ideas, the medium becomes the message. The project was based on thorough research about the links between the binary language of weaving-knitting and that of computing, as well as about the stereotypes around gender and technology: our focus was the contrast between the male-dominated computer hacking, and the domestic female ‘quick and easy’ hobby of knitting.

Fig 1 Vintage domestic knitting machine, Brother series (source:web)
Fig 2 The Jacquard Loom, invented in 1800 (source:web)
Fig 3 A punch-card used to create patterns in the Jacquard loom (source:web)
Fig 4, 5 Vintage posters advertising domestic knitting machines (source: web)

extract1

The yarn is neither metaphorical nor literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads which twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts. In and out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down through the ages of spinning and weaving, back and forth through the fabrication of fabrics, shuttles and looms, cotton and silk, canvas and paper, brushes and pens, typewriters, carriages, telephone wires, synthetic fibres, electrical filaments, silicon strands, fibre-optic cables, pixels screens, telecom lines, the Net, and matrices, the World Wide Web to come.

(from: Zeros + Ones. Digital Women and The New Technoculture, Sadie Plant, 1991, knitted text for </unravel;> Issue 1)

The 25-meter long knitted essay produced during the Degree Show includes a title, 4 chapters and a bibliography, and it is a collection of extracts and quotes by authors that inspire us in our practices: Margaret Atwood, Sadie Plant, Marshall McLuhan, Monique Wittig, Donna Haraway, Anni Albers, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, just to name a few.

The project also explores the communal spirit of a craft; a space in which people can share thoughts and opinions. Craft as a vehicle for political change.

For our second iteration, specially commissioned for our participation in the London Design Festival 2018 within the Creative Unions Exhibition (Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins), we produced </uravel;> Issue 2: Histories or Tales of Future Times, we knitted a 25-meter long fairy tale, challenging gender stereotypes in the fine line that divides History from a Tale.

The point is that we have not formed that
ancient world—it has formed us. We ingested
it as children whole, had its values and
consciousness imprinted on our minds as
cultural absolutes long before we were in fact
men and women. We have taken the fairy tales
of childhood with us into maturity, chewed
but still lying in the stomach, as real identity.

(from: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, A. Dworkin,1974, knitted text in </unravel;> Issue 2: Histories or Tales of Future Times )

According to Joseph Campbell “myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.” Folk tales and folk art (craft) are both parts of an inseparable interwoven net. They contain the spirit of the collective unconscious. We asked ourselves: what is the impact of those stories in shaping our perspective on gender? Our research focused on the dangerous promotion of gender stereotypes through fairy tales and the authors and thinkers that challenged those representations. With this project we wanted to write a different tale, in an optimistic attempt to imagine a more inclusive and queer future.

Each day for the duration of the performance we knitted one chapter of this tale, each told from the perspective of a new narrator. The structure of the written piece was, this time, inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron framed narrative structure – a literary technique of a story within a story. In The Decameron, ten characters/narrators shelter in a secluded villa outside Florence to escape the Great Plague, and each one tells a story every night.

And on day the first
the first narrator
sat by the spinning yarn
and thus begun:

(beginning of each chapter, inspired by The Decameron)

In our story, all voices are one and multiple at the same time. The narrator is an archetype, made out of an indefinite plurality of narrators. The story is a combination of perspectives, that we ambitiously put together inspired by Vladimir Propp’s formulas for creating stories.

You can find the texts and the bibliographies in the project’s website: www.projectunravel.com

Fig 6, 7, 8, 9. </unravel;>. Performance during Degree Show 2: Design, 2018
Fig 10. Knit detail
Fig 11. Prototyping sessions
Fig 12. Second installation for London Design Festival ’18, Creative Unions exhibition
Fig 13, 14, 15. The title for </unravel;> Issue 2 was inspired by one of the first collections of fairytales, Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals, 1697, written by Charles Perrault

L'articolo De-code Gender: A Knitted Perspective sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In the months that lead up to the making of the exhibition, we kept producing words, and the curators at the Estorick Collection gently kept steering us towards images. We knew the story we wanted to tell; we had the words for it, but a gallery space needs words and images, as the story is created at the intersection of the two.

The pivotal moment was an article in Life magazine, published in December 1961, illustrated with photographs by Mark Kauffman, showing models dressed in the latest Italian fashions set against thoroughly modern backdrops: Florence’s modernist Santa Maria Novella railway station, Gio Ponti’s iconic Pirelli building in Milan, and the Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin. The image of Italy presented by Life was that of an uncompromisingly modern country in which design, architecture, fashion and the visual arts worked in synergy, contributing to a radical stylistic transformation of the world.

As the search for images and objects continued, the story we wanted to tell began to take shape as research took us to the RIBA (to look at copies of Domus and Casabella), Tate Library (a hidden gem tucked away inside Tate Britain, with an impressive collection of 20^th-century Italian art volumes and exhibition catalogues), and the Fornasetti archive and store (a place of whimsy and playful imagination).

The story of Italy’s postwar economic recovery is well-known. The period of the so-called ‘economic miracle’ continues to look extraordinary: the pace and size of industrial growth in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s was unprecedented and remarkable by international standards. What is less well-known is the specific contribution of the art and design sector to Italy’s development during this time. Yet it was significant, and because of its close links with industry, it allows us to reconsider the role played by the arts more broadly in the economic recovery and refashioning of the country.

L'articolo The Making of our Exhibition: Thinking through Images (and Words) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

A display curated by Giuliana Pieri at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London (29 January-7 April) is one of the ways in which Interdisciplinary Italy is reaching out to a wider public interested in exploring modern Italian art and culture. The show focuses on the country’s new post-war identity, considering the role played by those artists and designers who worked across different disciplines, contributing to the fundamental transformation of Italian culture and its reception abroad. Art, fashion, design, craft and architecture come together under one roof in Gallery 4 at the Estorick Collection to help us rethink the way the arts contributed to economic and social change in post-war Italy.

[You can watch a short video about the exhibition at the following link]

During the 1950s, a special relationship developed between Italian architects, designers, industrial manufacturers, and mechanical and chemical industries. This collaborative approach was at the roots of the success of Italian industrial design in the 1960s – designers and architects being given the opportunity to experiment with new materials, new ideas and a wide range of disciplines. In the inter-war period, a handful of Italian companies such as Campari, Olivetti and Pirelli had already used this model, and continued to be protagonists of Italian innovation in forging close links between industry and design. However, the interdisciplinary approach typical of the post-war period had also characterised Italian avant-garde practice during the early years of the twentieth century, and could even be said to have been rooted in Italy’s distinguished cultural traditions, personified by the figure of the Renaissance polymath. 

Images from Life, American Vogue, and Domus magazine sit alongside works by of Piero Fornasetti, Emilio Pucci, Gio Ponti and Fausto Melotti–who is the focus of the main show in Gallery 1 and 2, titled Fausto Melotti: Counterpoint. The display retains the flavour of the mood-boards we created at the start of the exhibition project: iconic images of 1960s Italy, key protagonists and concepts, and key design pieces (including ceramic plates from Fornasetti, Pucci printed silks, and an Olivetti typewriter).

We are planning a series of dedicated educational activities for schools and universities. If you are interested, get in touch with us. Florian Mussgnug and Giuliana Pieri will also be giving gallery talks on Melotti in the coming months.

L'articolo The Making of Modern Italy: Art and Design in the Early 1960s sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Feu follet – the title of Rideal’s latest exhibition and of our co-authored artist’s book – recalls the flickering shapes of European folklore, hovering and blazing with delusive light, scheming to lead the wanderer astray: ignis fatuus, fuochi fatui. Like in Rideal’s earlier project, Splicing Time, flying cloths and non-figurative pictures evoke and record human traces in a richly historical landscape, the Roman Campagna. My own attempts to explore the fascination of Rideal’s mutable forms in a verbal narrative echoed this concern. The textual fragments that accompany Rideal’s images centre on local history, and more specifically on the peculiar region of the Pontine marshes: a vast expanse of foul-smelling swamps, that used to extend for miles, from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Volscian Mountains.

Sightings of ignis fatuus, I learned, are rarely reported today, perhaps as a result of the conversion of marshes to farmlands. What happened to the mysterious bursts of lightning activity that inspired the title of our book, and that were dear to Emily Dickinson, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, among others? The dreams and fears engendered by the subtle spirits, it appears, are now mostly figured by their absence. My exploration of the past – syncopated Image credit: Liz Rideal, Oblivion’s Mist, B. by Rideal’s images – thus unexpectedly conjured visions of a disquieting future: ruins from a world after the end of man. Progressive time – the featureless, calendrical line across which history, supposedly, marches forward – gave way to the intimate, interlocking temporalities of powerful emotions: nostalgia, regret, forecast, desire.

Feu follet, then, is more than the record of a creative complicity, a collaborative object. As a potentially open-ended process, our joint work encroaches on the layered processes of history itself, inviting complex and fleeting responses to what is read and what is seen. Pairing images with texts, we hope to inspire curiosities that will transcend our efforts, negotiations that will continue to flit around, like the deep-seated human need for pictures and stories itself.

Liz Rideal is an artist, author and Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, with over fifty international solo exhibitions and artworks held in public collections; which include; Tate; V&A; BM; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark; Berkeley Art Museum & Yale Centre for British Art, USA. She is the author of Mirror/Mirror: Self-portraits by Women Artists (2001); Insights: Self-portraits (2005); How to Read Painting (2014) and 500 Self-portraits (2018) and co-author, with Kathleen Soriano, of Madam and Eve: women portraying women (2018).

Feu Follet opens on Thursday, 15 November 2018 at The Crypt, St John’s, Waterloo, SE1 8TY, where it can be seen until 9 December 2018. Open Saturdays and Sundays, 14.00 – 18.00, or by appointment. Contact: lizrideal.com/about/contact. Please find the invitation here.

Florian Mussgnug and Liz Rideal, Feu Follet (Slade Press, 2018) – the artist’s book that accompanies the show and is on sale at the exhibition – will be presented at the The Slade School of Fine Art, WC1E 6BT, on Monday, 3 December 2018, 17:00-19:00. The book launch will be marked by a multidisciplinary roundtable which will include contributions by Dr Maria del Pilar Blanco (Oxford) and Prof. Derek Duncan (St Andrews). All welcome.

***

Image credit: Liz Rideal, Oblivion’s Mist, B.

L'articolo Will-o’-the-Wisping, in Word and Image sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

[Luciano Caruso, ‘La poesia come gestazione mentaleâ€, Il gesto poetico. Antologia della nuova poesia dâ€avanguardia, Uomini e Idee, vol. 18, Naples, 1968]

Luciano Caruso (1944-2002) was a leading figure of the Italian Neoavantgarde. I havenâ€t had the chance to meet him in person, but I had the opportunity to visit his rich personal library, now the Archivio Luciano Caruso in Florence, various times. This extraordinary material body of books and artistic works has become eloquent to me, thanks to the dialogues with Sonia Puccetti Caruso, the director of the archive. In the past couple of years, we have had long and lively conversations on Carusoâ€s artistic and intellectual practice, as well as on how this activity relates to broader national and international debates on visual poetry, intermedia, political activism.

Caruso was born in Naples, where he lived until 1976, and spent the rest of his life in Florence. After a degree in Medieval Aesthetics and a dissertation on the carmina figurata, he collaborated with intellectuals such as Salvatore Battaglia, Francesco Arnaldi, Nino Cortese, Vincenzo Cilento, Giuseppe Galasso, Francesco Compagna, and the painters of the Gruppo 58 Mario Persico, Guido Biasi, Enrico Bugli, Bruno Di Bello, Lucio Del Pezzo, Salvatore Paladino, and Mario Colucci. Thanks to Colucci, especially, he acquired significant knowledge about the Milanese movement of “nuclear art” (Enrico Baj, Dâ€Angelo, Piero Manzoni) and established contacts with the Parisian groups of Lettrism and Situationism. These experiences significantly informed his radical experimentation of creative writing, especially in the area of poetry, towards a utopia of democratisation of the artistic practice and of revolutionary creativity.

Caruso played indeed a crucial role in developing a certain idea of ‘total poetry†meant to overcome the traditional formal and material boundaries of the genre and coincide with political action and life. In the 1960s, he was active in a number of neo-avantgarde reviews revolving around visual poetry, such as Ex, Linea Sud, Ana Etcetera, Tool, which are commonly known as ‘esoeditoriaâ€, namely self-produced counter-industrial publications. Overall, these reviews all tried to rethink the relationship between form and ideology in fiction and poetry, some of them experimenting with either concrete poetry and/or visual poetry, wall poetry, sound poetry, happenings, and mixed media installations.

In 1968, Caruso edited, together with Corrado Piancastelli, an anthology of experimental poetry, Il gesto poetico, including a selection of poetic experiments published in these reviews throughout the 1960s. It was a foundational act for a new poetry which aimed at the fusion of all arts, as to realise a full fluxus, or continuum, of poetic energy across artistic boundaries.

Two theoretical writings opened the issue: ‘La poesia come gest-azione mentaleâ€Â  [Poetry as a mental gesture/action] written by Luciano Caruso and ‘Una proposta di lettura nel dissenso†[A proposal for a protest reading] written by Corrado Piancastelli. In ‘La poesia come gest-azione mentaleâ€, Caruso explains how this anthology was intended as a continuous poetic re-invention of our daily lives [reinvenzione poetica del quotidiano]. Far from being a literary exercise based on syntagms and normative language, this new poetry was based on action, gesture, and on a closer relationship between subject and object to the point that it would go beyond its own definition of poetry. Significantly, in 1967 Caruso founded, together with the poet Stelio Maria Martini, the review Continuum, which later metamorphosed in Continuazione (1973) and E/mana/zione (1976). These reviews became a laboratory for the rethinking of the concept of the literary review itself, as well as notions of ‘authorship’, ‘text’, and ‘artistic disciplines’.  

Today, the Archivio Luciano Caruso hosts the majority of Italian neo-avant-garde reviews, as well as libri dâ€artista, volumes on Futurism, visual poetry, new writing. The archive is an invaluable resource for any scholar working in the area of interart/intermedia relations, art and politics, interconnections between the historical avant-gardes and artistic practice in the digital age, and so many related fields of research. And it is not a typical archive. What is most invaluable is the key role played by Sonia Puccetti Caruso, a unique intermediary to enter this fascinating world. 

[This blog post will be followed by an interview with Sonia Puccetti Caruso]

L'articolo In Conversation with Sonia Puccetti Caruso sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In 2009 he founded with Silvia Loddo the ‘Osservatorio fotograficoâ€, an experimental platform dedicated to promoting contemporary photography. He has exhibited his work most recently at the Foundation A. Stichting in Brussels (2017) and he is currently exhibiting at Large Glass for Photo London 2017 and at the Italian Cultural Institute, May 18-21.

The Flying Carpet†(MACK, 2017) is his first main publication.

The Flying Carpet is a collection of 60 colour and black & white photographs taken from 2005 to 2015 in Romagna and in Sardinia. The photographs portray bizarre, suspended images and invite the viewer to turn their attention to a world of discarded objects and non-descript places, in Fabbriâ€s words ‘to see for the first time something that was right before our eyesâ€. In the bookâ€s postface Cesare acknowledges his debt to Cristina Campoâ€s ‘Il tappeto volante†(Gli Imperdonabili, 1987) for the title metaphor and for suggesting that only by starting from the everyday our imagination can take off, ‘svolazzareâ€, namely flying here and there, in a ‘flight of fancy†which these photographs encourage. This playful game of imagination echoes Luigi Ghirriâ€s lesson of lesson of photography as a means of learning afresh how to see with child-like wonder; indeed, as Cesare reveals in conversation, it was Ghirriâ€s collection of essays Niente di antico sotto il sole (1997), which also included a wide selection of his photographs, that ‘offered me a valuable starting point, both theoretically and practically, presenting me with a type of photographic practice that I could both observe and try out myselfâ€.

Following the example of Ghirri and other of his contemporaries, Cesareâ€s photography builds on a fruitful exchange both with the photographic tradition within Italy and beyond and with other arts and disciplines, from literature to urban planning. In particular urban planning, which Cesare studied in Venice with Bernardo Secchi, provides him with a method for his own photographic practice. As Cesare told me in conversation, ‘Secchi used to say that urban planning is done on foot. […] It is thanks to his courses that I have developed a greater curiosity about the places where I live – an approach that I have continued in my own photographic practice. At first I thought that this slow approach would be a waste of time but then I realised that it was a precious lesson: getting to know in depth a place that you photograph, its history and geography, by talking to the people who live there and by discovering how things react to light in different seasons, is like increasing the tonal range you have at your disposalâ€. A similar lesson Cesare also learnt from his decade-long collaboration with Guido Guidi, who has taught him a practice of ‘slow gaze†and a patient return to the same places. Despite being a digital ‘nativeâ€, by choosing to work with a large-format camera, Cesare inscribes himself within the photographic tradition established by Guidi, and, before him, by early American photographers.

Another interartistic dialogue that underpins Cesareâ€s photography and locates it generationally is that with the graphic novels and political satire magazines which stemmed from the Bologna counterculture movements of the late 1970s and 1980s. As Cesare acknowledged, the graphic novel taught him to see things more attentively thanks to its emphasis on detail and its amplification, with the aim of boosting comical or satirical aspects. Similarly, photography can blow up an object or a detail, sometimes with comical or even grotesque effects, in order to make the viewer smile or appreciate what is in front of their eyes in a different light. For Cesare ‘this lightness, this capacity to see things with a child-like wonder is an intrinsic aspect of photography, in its turning a three-dimensional reality onto a bi-dimensional planeâ€.

This text is based on email conversations with Cesare Fabbri and on a live dialogue between Cesare Fabbri, Marina Spunta and Michael Mack at the Italian Cultural Institute in London on 20 March 2017. ‘The Flying Carpet†by Cesare Fabbri is published by MACK.

 

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